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That might be a problem, but the big problem is that users of the system focus on consumer content such as movies and TV shows, and so people wind up seeding ne

That might be a problem, but the big problem is that users of the system focus on consumer content such as movies and TV shows, and so people wind up seeding newer stuff or very popular stuff and as time goes by the number of seeds for older content goes down and the content gets lost, and there's little interest in seeding stuff from the 70s or 80s. Bittorrent is a bad way to archive anything long term because it is unreliable due to user dynamics. Can some other system fix those dynamics and become a more robust way to archive data? Maybe. Or maybe the problem is due to how people think. I like to think though that a system where downloads are not tracked by seeders would be more conducive to archiving.

6510 5y ago
Yes, things are overly focused on pirating new releases and the clients are feeding into that problem (or that line of thinking) I use to seed say 100 old things, sort by seeds, if there are leaches and no seeds give it 5-10 kb until a copy exists again (everything else I don't seed) I've also had things complete after years. Disk space is cheap. It seems doable for clients to periodically run over archived torrents and seed the dead ones. In stead the whole list is actively parsed for every action. Say someone has a youtube channel with 500 videos. Also distributing the videos over bittorrent shouldn't have to cost much. But then they have to jump a lot of hoops, run a client with 500 active seeds in it. Its so user-unfriendly a different [more dedicated] medium is probably a better idea at this point.